2This article examines Donovan’s disenchanted vision of Celtic Tiger Ireland through the jarring contradictions of a society torn between its buoyant new landscape and an enduring nostalgia. The country’s changes are first perceived in terms of space: Donovan maps out the new Irish landscape with characters navigating a labyrinth of places once familiar but now utterly changed, in keeping with the pervading placelessness of hypermodernity. The instability at work in the landscape also attests to a new, ambiguous relationship with time. In the stories, characters are torn between the ubiquitous imperative to look forward and their own desperate urge to look back and retain the past. Uncertainty and nostalgia finally culminate in existential disillusion when characters realise that nothing is as it seems, and that the veneer of an easy life and material comfort only conceals their deep-rooted feeling of helplessness and solitude.

Lost in Space

3The most striking feature in Donovan’s stories is the shift of paradigm at the heart of his spatial depiction of the new Ireland: from a land of bicycles in the 1930s and 1940s, Ireland has become a nation of cars. As the symbol of both rural and urban Irish life for decades, the figure of the bicycle has so permeated Irish literature since the early twentieth century that a change in transportation – both in real life and in its literary representations – is of ground-breaking significance: more than technical progress and affluence, it points to a radical transformation of life itself. In his 1995 poem “Kings and Bicycles,” Donovan evoked childhood memories at a crossroads in time, when fast cars were an attribute of the wealthy American tourist, and the first bicycles were still a vivid memory in the collective imagination.

• 2 Gerard Donovan, Kings and Bicycles, Dublin, Salmon Publishing, 1995, p.12.

Growing up in Galway, I never thought about ancestry
except when gentle foreigners stuck their heads out of expensive cars,
asking directions to a town whose name they could not rescue
from the neat pages of the tourist guides;
and following my finger's gentle trace, they sailed down the boreen
into the caress of lost fields, eternally optimistic in their search
for a place just beyond pronunciation.
[…]
I imagined the village crowd at the first bicycles –
circling High Nellie, High Nellie by the gate or at full speed
around every pothole and bump on the wet, brambly tracks2 […]

4In the poem, foreigners drive in search of an archaeological past. Optimism and exhilaration saturate their perception of the landscape: for them, being lost in space is a sailing adventure. Yet theirs is an irrelevant pursuit to the boy whose past is shaped by living memory, and whose sense of speed is attuned to the bumps and turns in the country tracks. In Country of the Grand, on the other hand, the shift from bicycles to cars comes with a radical change of scale, shrinking the whole country both in time and space as distances are now measured in driving hours, and Galway has become a weekend commute for fast-living Dubliners.

5The first story in the collection, “Morning Swimmers”, opens with a car: “In the first week of May, before the water in Galway Bay changed to a mild summer blue, Eric Hartman and John Berry drove to Jim’s house and announced that they had gone swimming that morning” (9). Jim’s memory of his childhood’s swimming days is crucially associated with bicycles: “One man used to leap straight from the sea onto his black bike, cycling home instead to change, stopping wet on the way to buy a newspaper” (10). There is no break in time and space as the man transfers seamlessly from his swim to his bicycle ride and onto the social world of the newspaper agent. In Donovan’s new Ireland, the trip has lost its adventurous edge: it is a casual drive in the comfort of a waterproof vehicle shielding morning swimmers from the elements. “Morning Swimmers” is a story of overheard conversations and broken heart. After he accidentally hears friends discuss his unfaithful wife, a lonely Jim retreats to his car. His solitary swim had made him one with nature as he “entered fully the green silence, opening his eyes to the salt and the waving seaweed, the fat tendrils’ ballet in a slow current” (11). Once in the car, however, the protective bubble turns into a confined space, irretrievably shutting out the rest of the world.

He pulled into a parking space and glanced out the window: the hotel, a restaurant, petrol stations in a strip, the rest was night.

This place, he thought, could be marked as loneliness on a map. Galway had spread in the past decade, gushing for miles along the roads that led to it, pink and blue neon signs, huge hotels standing alone till more business built up around them, and then the rabbit-cage houses. (31-2)

8Despite the obvious parallel with the great open space of the American landscape, there is no sense of elation here, only loneliness and the stifling, de-humanized “rabbit-cage houses.” Donovan’s cars are thus just one instance of the solitary bubbles of modern life, cutting through social and affective bonds as they drive across the homogenized architecture of generic suburbia, reminding us that the country’s integration into a global capitalist market has no liberating effect on the solitary, anonymous driver.

9“By Irish Nights” gives us the same view from the driver’s seat, through a nighttime drive that prompts the narrator’s impersonal reverie. In this story, Donovan’s ambiguous use of the third-person plural turns cars into full-fledged characters, as drivers have become one with their machine:

But there are so many places and so many cars. Across the country, from Donegal to Tipperary and down to Kerry, the roads have begun to fill, coast road, roads through small towns, roads widening into the midlands, narrowing into cities, red signs, yellow signs, bump ahead, one hundred this, fifty that. So much to notice with a shoe on a pedal, a hand on a wheel, an eye on a road. (74)

12“Country of the Grand” opens with a different place: a backward glance into the past, which derails the routine of successful solicitor Frank Delaney. The story’s opening ironically debunks its victorious title, suggesting that fragility and self-doubt still hover over the men and women riding the Celtic Tiger:

As he left the house that morning, Frank Delaney remembered being so young that he was not able to walk, struggling from his father to his mother, going soft at the knees and collapsing into her hands. This was the image that reached for him across almost fifty years as he stood at the door and snapped his briefcase shut. (55)

13As his wife and colleagues discuss property development and investments in Spain and Poland, Frank Delaney feels the irrepressible urge to see his childhood home again. Frank’s longing for the past and acute sense of loss translate as spatial inadequacy when he drives back to his old neighbourhood and does not recognise the house.

He drove slowly up the hill and waited at a crossroads traffic light. Already he could see that the street had been widened, and when he stopped outside the low white wall of Number 5, he saw that the tree that used to be in the front garden was gone, along with the white and red geraniums he planted thirty-two years ago. The lawn was a concrete parking space with three cars angled into it. (56)

14The faint echo of pastoral bliss in Frank’s memory of the old house shatters over the harsh reality of concrete and metal, thus pitting the abundance of wealth, measured in numbers of cars outside the house, against the homeliness of a more human-scale sense of happiness. After he sees the house, Frank’s anxiety turns to a panicked frenzy and he joins the compellingly capitalized “GALWAY CITY HOSPICE 8K RUN” (61) in his tailored suit and shoes, in a desperate bid to show his old childhood friend that “his running days are [not] over” (62). Frank’s predictable failure in the race only reflects his own deep-rooted feeling that he has lost himself on the sidelines of his own life. After meandering back to his childhood house again, Frank finds himself “at the main road south to Galway, his thumb out for a lift to the passing cars that droned out of the night” (69). This brief moment of pedestrian helplessness echoes with Frank’s recollection of his early walking days in the story’s opening lines, but with a darker undertone, since his parents’ supporting arms have been replaced with the ubiquitous car. Donovan’s car-bound characters cannot feel the ground beneath their feet and have become commuting strangers in a strange land. The Latin motto, “Ubi pedes ibi patria” is particularly apt here to explain Donovan’s depiction of his character’s spatial disconnectedness with their surroundings. There is no resolution in “Country of the Grand”: Frank comes home to a wife who turns away in bed, and lulls himself to sleep with the half-hearted hope that she loves him still, that “It [is] not too late” (72). In the story, Frank’s longing for the past leads him astray, literally, as he loses himself in the sprawling landscape of suburban Galway.

15Throughout Young Irelanders, the characters’ pervading sense of disorientation and spatial disruption is a direct symptom of their ambiguous longing for times past. Donovan’s subtle landscape of loneliness brings us beyond the surface cartography of ring roads and housing developments, and into the disorienting archaeology of the new Ireland.

Lost in Time

16Donovan’s characters are lost in time as much as they are lost in space, and the two are closely linked. While speed and time contraction distort our perception of the outside world, Michael Cronin notes that

• 13 Michael Cronin, “Inside Out: Time and Place in Global Ireland”, New Hibernia Review, Vol. 1 (...)

space is what happens to place when time tends towards zero. The less time a person has to dwell on what it means to live in a particular place, the more the place they inhabit becomes filled with the spatialised ubiquity of commodity advertising, ratings-driven media product and context-less information bites. Place becomes the site of the multiple surfaces of consumption, a tantalizingly fragmented space, detached from any longer term sense of what it means to dwell in and be responsible for a particular place and how the place might be positioned relative to others13.

17Our understanding of time, history and memory is therefore embedded in our perception of the landscape around us. In Country of the Grand, when the promise of high speed comes to a standstill at the obligatory rush-hour traffic jam, characters and readers are left to ponder the sedimented layers of history that make up the shape of the new Ireland. In “Archaeologists”, two students at an excavating site struggle with their contradictory feelings about the new economy of the past that has taken over their academic field.

The year before, a photo from a plane captured a swelling near the proposed petrol station and parking area off the new national road. A part of a pot was found in the ground not far from where the bog began. A private consulting company in Dublin won the license to excavate and hired the couple on the site as temporary summer archaeologists. (79)

19In the story, two understandings of the past come head to head in the couple’s strained relationship. The ambitious Robert is focused on his career and wants to settle into a comfortable, middle-class life; he diligently follows the rules of an institution in line with the new economy: “… the old Irish dug up from the ground, and now the new Irish were hiding them again, burying them in long, dark warehouses and reports” (97). Robert views historical research as just a means to his professional success, and he embarks into “the politics of archaeology” with conference papers “designed to say just the right amount of nothing” (94). Emma, on the other hand, is obsessed with displaying the discoveries of the past for all to see. She is a field archaeologist, the “Lady of the bog” (95): her tireless dedication to the excavating site echoes her longing for self-understanding and identity: “Yes, this was the dream she had, that when she dug through the bog she found herself” (92). The belligerent foreman embodies the inexorable demands of the economy: “Every day is a business day for me […] I have two machines and a whole crew waiting to build” (81-2). Time is money, but it is crucially understood in spatial terms. For Emma, fifteen minutes mean another two inches uncovered. Her slow, careful brush reflects her reverence for the long process of historical stratification that covered up the ancient tomb. The foreman’s pressing “Where are we?” (81), on the other hand, betrays his utter inability to understand the depth and significance of Emma’s meticulous efforts. Time is at stake in the territorial struggle playing out on the site: time lost – that of economic imperatives – and time regained, the archaeologist’s obsession with finding herself.

20For Emma, “an archeological dig is not a delay” (82) because the past is an essential, organic part of the landscape:

We should recover the evidence and leave it where we find it, at every roadside stop, in each new housing development. Build glass cases and put the material in them, their knives, their pots, what they placed in their hair to keep it neat. Show how thousands of years ago, so many people lived here. […] And when you stand at those cases you can look around and see the same horizon. It would be so comforting. (98-99)

With one glance across time she saw the skull, the shoulders, the spine curled in two short strands that wove through shallow muck. A mother had cried for a long time after this child died. Three thousand years ago was yesterday: she was buried here, exactly as she lay. (107)

22Emma sees a mirror image of herself in the ancient remains, as young and old become one. The commanding presence of the past finally halts the battle between old and new when the three characters stare in silent awe “as the brown and mute bones of the Young Irelander moved in and out of the dark” (108).

23In “Archaeologists,” the past literally shapes the body of a country, and there is no erasing its traces: they are layered in a poetic archive that reports and warehouses cannot match. Donovan raises the question of history to show how his characters’ acute consciousness of the new is integral to their longing for the past. The bones and fragmented remains of “Archaeologists” are one instance of Donovan’s Proustian fondness for the objects and pictures that trigger involuntary memory. Unlike the commoditised artefacts of global consumer culture, Donovan’s symbolic objects of memory bring us closer to an essence of the past: the mirror reflections in “Another Life” and “Glass” and the coming and going of birds in “Summer of Birds” offer visions associated with bittersweet childhood memories, fleeting happiness and the end of innocence.

A race steward waved and shouted something about no spectators being allowed in the race as Frank turned into a lane that ran parallel to the river for about five hundred yards before veering back into the connecting fields, where the slow runners ahead were already turning in a sleek line. He made it halfway down the lane and slowed under a stitch like a blade in his side. […] As Frank ran through the gate that led from the river back to the fields he knew that he could not run to the finish line. (64-65)

25In Young Irelanders, characters can only come to terms with their sense of spatial and temporal displacement by confronting their self-delusion and denial, and Donovan’s bittersweet portrait of the rewards and pressures of the new Ireland finally brings us to the disenchantment at the heart of modern life.

Disenchantment

28In “Another Life,” a widow becomes aware of her late husband’s infidelity when she inherits a house she has never seen. Coping with the heart-breaking discovery leaves her with a shattered sense of self, but she harbours no anger against her late husband.

She woke before dawn in a parked car on a dark and empty street. The rain on the windshield delivered her waking thought, that Paul had a child with another woman and maintained a house that Mary did not know about. She leaned into her reflection and touched the cold window with her forehead and joined the old woman who lived in that hard, thin, rainy world of glass. Was she that old? He had divided his life in two. Would it have been better to know? She would not have been able to cope at all. (141-142)

29Mary’s emotions unravel in the confined microcosm of her car, echoing Jim’s helpless despair in “Morning Swimmers”. Yet her disenchantment comes not with anger but with resignation to a fate which has already been played out: “To win all that time from bitterness, where a broken heart might never win back its ease. She did not have the time not to forgive” (145). Donovan leaves us with an ambiguous sense of hope when Mary comes to terms with her husband’s betrayal: “She would see what had been true in their lives” (145). The story’s bittersweet irony suggests how close resilience is to self-deception when surviving a broken heart.

30“Shoplifting in the USA” tells a similar story of betrayal. The first-person narrator, who has come back to Ireland and settled in Ennis with his American wife, learns that their relationship has been based on a lie: “finally I stole you. Remember your girlfriend Cynthia? […] I told her you had a disease” (52). The narrator’s reaction is one of weary acceptance:

Now here was the obvious: Heather had stolen my life. But I needed to go to the bathroom. So I switched on the light and stood over the bowl. Nothing came. I flushed the toilet anyway, went back and lay as far from her on the bed as I could manage and not fall off.

Heather said, Did you remember to set the alarm?
Yes.
Okay. Goodnight then.
I waited for the rage. But the hour was late and I was tired. (54)

31Here, resignation comes as a tragicomic anticlimax: there is no resolution to the character’s traumatic awareness. Donovan’s depiction of his characters’ private lives meets the general disenchantment of a country losing itself in its economic success the better to forget what has been left behind. At the same time, some personal responsibility is at stake in the characters’ refusal to fully confront the causes of their underlying depression.

33When reviewing the collection, author Joseph O’Connor praised Donovan’s ability to see the Celtic Tiger “for what it truly was, in all its shimmering newness and garish strangeness – its ugliness somehow related to its beauty.” For O’Connor, Country of the Grand reflects the uncertainties of a society struggling to cope with the intensity and rapidity of change:

• 27 Joseph O’Connor, “Riding the Celtic Tiger,” The Guardian, 9 August 2008, [http://www.thegua (...)

Much more than a book about the Celtic Tiger […], this is a collection about the anxieties and sublimated fears of the Ireland that rejected the Lisbon treaty in June, despite being commanded not to do so by its establishment. There's a sense of having come too far, of something precious being lost, doing battle with a simultaneous and equally adamant mistrust of the past. Is Ireland European? A kind of America? Or both? What did the good years mean27?

34Such questions are left unresolved in Country of the Grand, and only the last story brings a sense of peaceful closure to Donovan’s collection.

35In “A Visit,” a middle-aged man pushes his wheelchair-bound mother from her nursing home all the way to town, along the main road. In these final scenes, Donovan’s pedestrian character reclaims the road, thus ironically reversing the objectifying gaze of car-culture on the cars themselves.

Another few hundred yards and the traffic thickened, people glancing out of their cars at this man pushing a woman along a road in a wheelchair, nothing but blank faces in glass fleeting by with glances that could be read in that instant, what this must be, what is happening, why is that woman on the road and who is that man and where could they be going; but they drove steadily on under the shifting cloud of the late afternoon sky, probably because others were following right behind. (219)

38Most of the stories in the collection are set in Galway, and, significantly, the book cover of the American edition shows a photograph of the diving tower at Salthill, with a solitary diver in mid-air. The sepia colours and the faded title, evocative of an old postcard, tie present and past into one, imparting us with the foreboding sense that the new, successful, booming Ireland is soon to become a picture of the past.